SA prez wants to lower drinking age

You probably caught wind of the story yesterday about 115 college presidents calling for lawmakers to lower the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. Did you know one of them is in San Antonio?

Lou Agnese, president of University of the Incarnate Word, is one of the presidents who signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, a group that claims the higher drinking age has done nothing to curb binge drinking among college students. Today, Agnese issued a statement explaining why he signed up:

I’ve always disagreed with the decision to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21. An 18-year-old is allowed to vote, get married, enlist in the military and enroll in college because society accepts her or his ability to make decisions as an adult. We should be consistent and also respect their intellectual capacity to understand the responsibility that comes with drinking.

And if 18-year-olds are old enough to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country by serving in the military, they ought to be able to have a beer or glass of wine.

For colleges, lowering the drinking age would also take away the burden of policing underage drinking, though Agnese made no mention of that in his statement.

Agnese’s stance puts him in the crosshairs of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which says that lowering the drinking age would result in more fatal car wrecks.

According to Associated Press reporter Justin Pope, MADD even questioned the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on to the initiative.

“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD, told the AP.

In his article, Pope noted that both sides believe college drinking is a big problem, quoting an Associated Press analysis that found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005.